The emotional graph up to and after the 30th March Indo-Pak Cricket World Cup semi-final

Also published on Rediff.com : "Indo-Pak WC semi-final: the emotional graph"

and pluggd.in

God is great! For doing the most unexpected in the most unexpected way.  No one ever imagined that there could be an Indo-Pak semi-final in the cricket world cup 2011, but it’s needless to say that everyone wished for such an event.  So the divine intervened and gave its disciples what they can cherish most, an event that can cheer and raise the emotions of the two nations (brothers) to the utmost peak that are divided by history yet united by cricket!

30^th March 2011 is a historic day, I think it calls for declaring the day as a national day-off (at least I have decided to give a day off to all my employees on 30^th and we may all watch it together), so that at least for a day the combined population of the two countries does nothing else but enjoys a great game of cricket that is the only thing that unites them in today’s time.

A historical event in the great game of cricket where people are only driven by their hearts and emotions are at the utmost peak, an event for which no insurance company in the world will insure even the strong hearted!, an event that I am sure the terrorists also long for and for a change are glued to their TV sets and not to their suicide jackets!

Let’s see what sort of an emotional graph the people of the two nations will go through due to this event and till the finals on 2^nd April.

The Pre Match Scenario

Everything else can wait as everyone is just waiting for 30^th March 2011, the only talk in the house, in get togethers, at the pan shop, at the borders etc. etc. etc. is who may, should or will win the semi-final.  The only prayers received by Bhagawan/Allah is that our respective team must win, making God’s job easier as well as difficult as only one team can win, I am sure the divine umpires(Bhagawan and Allah) must be consulting each other hard before hitting the keys “Select All + Tathastu/Amen”

It is such an enthusiasm that even the politicians of the two countries have forgotten all diplomatic differences and the on-going cold war by given in to the event and decided to meet up in advance and at the event.  After all the Prime Ministers are normal cricket fans like any of their citizens!

The teams and captains are not able to hide their mixed and confused emotions of patriotism, anxiety and fear.  Their press talks and mind games have started and they are very skilfully exuding confidence of winning while ensuring it is not perceived as over confidence by giving utmost respect to the other team’s chances, capabilities and form.

India will go all out and try to win it not just for the country but for the God of cricket “Tendulkar” and Pakistan team will go all out and try to win it to restore the faith in cricket of their entire countrymen.

The security guys are worried as to how will they stay at the peak of alertness when their hearts & minds are inside the stadium and eyes & ears looking out for the nearest TV or radio/mobile.

The terrorists will be making merry, as I am sure they will be planning to take a day-off and enjoy the match rather than planning an attack because such an event is the only stress buster for them also! Moreover attacking on such an event may give them highest visibility (all negative) but they may even loose whatever little sympathisers they have even within their own organizations ;)

During the Match Scenario

The pressure will be at its peak both for the teams as well as the spectators.  It will get doubled for the teams due to the presence of their Prime Ministers.

Every member of the team and every citizen will follow every superstition they know or follow.  Given the amount of Visas issued there will be ample support in the stadium for the Pak team and that will help them feel better, though the Indian team must be thinking “it would have been good if we played this match at a neutral venue”.  Every member of the team must surely be deprived of sleep but their bodies will automatically compensate by pumping up the adrenaline and all other hormones required for making them extra fit for the match.

People will be at their innovative best to create and try every “Totaka” possible, including switching channels or not watching the match at all, to ensure a wicket falls or the batsmen hits a boundary. 

The security guys will face the most difficult situation as all the while their minds are going to be wondering about what’s happening inside the stadium and they wanting to check the score; those inside the stadium will be confused about whether to watch the match or to lookout for suspicious people and objects.

The two prime ministers for a while may forget who they are and what are they supposed to do diplomatically and will be more worried about how to control their emotions while going through the roller coaster of the match.  They may give strict instructions and exact timings when the cameras must focus on them, they may even check with their intelligence agencies if they have any technology that can jam or deceive a TV camera.

The Post Match Scenario

Thank God, everyone knows and understands that eventually only one team will win and it will be the one that plays the best on that given day.  Whether their team wins or loses, no one is going to be annoyed with Bhagawan/Allah and they will pray the same way for the very next encounter.

The winning team people will have the biggest party as if they won the Finals and the losing team people will look out for reasons to blame the defeat on something like weather, planetary positions, pressure, bad form, Toss, using the wrong “totaka” etc. etc. etc.  In the end everyone will find some reason to convince themselves and take solace in the fact that it was a tight game and we could have won if this ….that….or that….or that would have happened!

If India wins, it won’t be a big surprise as they are among the favourites and the entire country and team will be one step away from realizing a dream of giving the God of cricket “Tendulkar” the best parting gift before he finally retires before the next world cup.  And I am sure that every Pakistani citizen will overcome the grief thinking, it is destined to be “God of cricket’s” world cup this time, and at least this world cup revived our team and our faith in cricket in Pakistan.

If Pakistan wins; it will be like getting a second life and will rejoice the entire nation and restore their faith in a sport they love more than anything else.  For India it will be a grief beyond repair not for the loss to Pakistan but for the fact that “Tendulkar” for whom cricket is the biggest faith or religion and who gave his everything to this sport could not get back something he longed for before he finally says good bye to it forever.

Whoever wins; let’s cheer for the winner together in the finals, so that the cup comes to the sub-continent. 

The Startup Journey – Give Me a Lever (Pole) Long Enough

Published on pluggd.in

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” - Archimedes

I started my journey as an entrepreneur around 3 years back. Coincidentally, the whole startup ecosystem in Bangalore was taking shape during that period, thus I got the opportunity to closely interact with the various ecosystem entities like OCC, Pluggd.in, headstart, TiE, NeN, media etc. and of course the various types of investors. I got a lot of help from all and it benefited me in my journey.

Fortunately, I realized it early that making investment a priority is certainly the wrong way to plan your execution. While all this was happening the recession struck and we had to make some tough choices and then we changed our business model and boot strapped our way forward.

Today, I am happy that I took some right decisions and we not just survived the toughest period but are now growing at a decent pace. We knew given the type of technology we have and the general awareness and openness for such a concept (enterprise 2.0 and Collective Intelligence), it is not going to be a cake walk and investors may only enter once we overcome the technology, market and business risk successfully. We were lucky to get early adopters in enterprise though who helped us survive as well as refine our value proposition.

I am sure almost all of us have similar stories to share and there tends to be a generic pattern among entrepreneur’s journeys. Idea of this post is to try and portray the path to success for entrepreneurs by knitting together the most common scenarios and help aspiring entrepreneurs not repeat common mistakes.

The comic (edutainment) video below provides the whole picture from start to success; I am sure most of you will be able to relate to it, do share your comments and anecdotes too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YJfaU-krk&hd=1

Minnows can beat the giants [Lessons From Ireland-England Match]

[Article published on pluggd.in ]

Yesterday, I was delighted to watch probably the most exciting and historic match of Cricket World Cup 2011. It was great watching minnows Ireland beat relatively mighty England through bravery powered by skills that were applied intelligently.

There is a lot for startups to learn from it; I thought it will be worth sharing with you all what I think was my key takeaway from this match and get to know your thoughts as well.

After the match when I reflected upon this incredible win of Ireland, what I realized was the significance of the timing and application of a power play. We all as startups plan a power play to become big in our growth journey as a startup, what matters is when we go for the power play and with what sort of attitude and skills.

Situation

Ireland was 111/5 in 25^th over and was chasing 328 and it was only possible to achieve it in a dream. Choice was between continuing at the same pace and end up losing (with dignity) or attempt to play unconventionally and try for a historic win (Glory) without worrying about the level of dignity of loss. They choose glory! (The attitude)

The Strategy

What was required for the dream to become a reality was to score at an amazing rate for a few overs while they have wickets in hand and get closer to target without losing further wickets. Probability was bleak!. O’Brien’s only hope was the power play, which they took in 32^nd over with immense confidence on his and his captain’s (on the other end) abilities (Risk taking and self-confidence) .

Achievement: Input Vs. Outcome

It took Kevin O’Brien to smash the fastest century in World Cup history to register the highest run chase ever in a World Cup.

Relevance to Startups

As startups, especially bootstrapped ones, we keep putting hard work and grow our ventures slowly and steadily, whatever may come. We all wish for glory and wanna win the game against the biggest of competition despite resource constraints. We all have a plan wherein we will enter a phase where we will need to take “Power Play” – in terms of scaling business through aggressive marketing efforts but we mostly avoid taking it early as we are waiting for more funds, more resources, and more customers to have in place before we unleash ourselves.

Is this the right approach? I think not, especially because more resources/funds is something only a few can manage (VCs have a 99.79% rejection rate), so one must not delay their plans beyond a pointelse you will end up losing, only solace will be, it may be a dignified defeat (some sort of low value exit).

What Ireland taught us is that you might not have the best skills (experience and record) and resources (5 wickets in hand) but, if you are playing for glory (WIN) then have the self-confidence and go for the kill, apply your mind to come out with a plan that might be risky but is feasible, only then you can get glory despite being a minnow.

So think and identify when to take your power play (when business demands) and how to go about it despite the constraints. You definitely need lots of luck but luck also favours the brave only!

Evaluating Criteria for Enterprise 2.0 Platform

This story was published in Dataquest, check here

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Author Name: Sumeet Anand and SM Nafay Kumail 
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Selecting the right technology and solution provider is a critical factor for every IT-enabled enterprise initiative. It is generally agreed by analysts, users and experts that an IT solution should always be selected based on a holistic comparison rather than comparison of features alone. It becomes even more important to ensure that such a solution is in line with the objectives and interest of a customer when we are dealing with the space largely represented as Enterprise 2.0 and has a complex vendor mixtraditional ECM vendors, relatively newer Web/Enterprise 2.0 type vendors, and open source stack based product vendors.

Analysis of the Current Scenario

As the Enterprise 2.0 is becoming a crowded space, it is important to understand the current situation in terms of what various players are doing and key trends that are emerging:

• Some vendors have proprietary technology components while others have open standards;
• Most of these, especially the traditional vendors have limited flexibility and customization is expensive and complex. Changes and customization which is needed due to dynamic business situation could compromise on stability of system and its effectiveness. They rarely have contemporary platform capabilities to build and evolve intelligent applications that support complete interoperability;
• The current solutions are mostly features based propositions. The feature-richness becomes the focus instead of alignment with relevance to specific needs of an enterprise and work reality;
• Despite the fact that cloud computing is catching up, it is yet to become a generally accepted standard. Clearly, there are some players who have on-premise offerings while others are restrictively from cloud;
• Most of these are relatively expensive solutions and can pose challenges when scaling up because considerable cost is involved in the process; and,
• Most of these solutions follow old architectures and paradigms with limited or no semantic capabilities and innovation for higher relevance to an enterprise. This may not be compliant with evolving global data interoperability standards and paradigms such as big data, open data, and linked data etc.

Key Aspects of a Holistic Evaluation

For a holistic evaluation it is important to not just focus on technology aspect but get into the details of its architecture and go deeper into the issues of whether offered features really solve the problems and if the technology is scalable and secure and that people would find it usable and useful as much as it will be easy to integrate with an organizations existing and extended technologies and integrate without hassles. Similarly, it doesnt end with buying a technology; it is important to understand the deployment, engagement model and services to ensure that the solution is complete in itself and develops mutual trust and relationships to solve real problems technology.

Technology

Architecture: It is the architecture that determines the performance, scalability and cost of implementing a technology. Customers hence must look at what is under the hood of any software product, the architectural principles it follows and the complexities therein. Propriety based technologies often lack the flexibility of dynamic situations todays customers are faced with. Software based on open source stack and standards with zero propriety technology is the answer.

Features: Most cotemporary technologies focus on the richness of their features. It is a known fact that the amount of features doesnt matter when it comes to solving problems. What matters is fitment to requirements, amount of customization required and willingness of a vendor to customize the tool and also maintain those customizations. A more desirable solution must be the one that meets most of your requirements out-of-the-box or with minimal customizations and must involve very low cost and complexity for incorporating customizations.

Scalability: Scalability of solution is the prime concern today. Customers must evaluate the time, cost and complexity involved in scaling up a software implementation as inability to do so can undermine the entire investment in the long run. We should take account into not just the money we spend but also the time and effort required to scale up when the need arises.

Codebase: Most technologies of the day are an outcome of more than a decade of evolution of products. This obviously leads to integration of multiple solution components to create an integrated solution. Each product follows its own release roadmap and thus becomes a barrier to future changes. Integration of multiple codebases (components) reduces the performance of application, increases maintenance costs and leads to compromising on usability. Poor usability leads to poor adoption and failure of change management. Hence, it is important to consider this aspect of technology before going in for a particular solution.

Compliance to Contemporary Standards: The legacy applications are often rigid due to being old in architecture and design. When investing in a technology customers must evaluate the technology standards followed and how contemporary and how future-proof these standards are.

UI & Usability: Usability is the key to adoption by users. A feature-rich application that makes usage difficult due to technology issues like integration of multiple components with rigid architectures and limited ability to customize reduces the usability of the solution. Poor adoption is one of the main reasons why many such initiatives fail to yield expected results. Right solution must provide flexibility to modify UI and interaction model based on specific needs of the context in which the solution is applied.

Integration: Ability to integrate to existing applications and data repositories helps in leveraging previous investments and reduces cost of switching. While going for a solution, it is critical to evaluate whether the proposed technology offers out of box integration and custom integration at manageable costs.

Real-time Collaboration and Content Management: In todays era of real-time communication and collaboration, it is an imperative that solution offers real-time content management. This is a key criterion for evaluation as it can lead to major enhancement in knowledge, responsiveness, and productivity. The lack of it could lead to further silos which need to be broken to ensure seamless communication and knowledge exchanges.

Semantic and Common Tags: Given that we are investing in 2010 when technology is moving towards a semantic world, we must have semantic capabilities and foundation in the solution we choose. The solution must allow keeping a common set of semantic tags for content to avoid duplicity and have more intelligent organization of the content in an organization.

Platform Capabilities: We not only need a tool or software but a platform that allows us to build relevance and usage out-of-the-box as a best practice application. It should also provide the capability to extend and evolve it with more relevant features and functionalities by allowing to deploy custom applications.

Access Control: Security is the biggest concern in using social computing tools inside an enterprise. The technology must provide an advance support for data object level access control out-of-the-box. Moreover, we should look at a future where we may use the same platform for collaboration in our larger ecosystem of customers, partners and other stakeholders with authorization based secure access from the same back-end storage system but different extranet microsites.

Deployment, Service and Support

Deployment Model: It is important to consider the way a certain product is deployed and delivered like on premise, Cloud, and SaaS etc. This has a direct relation to our security, cost, support and customization concerns. Organizations must evaluate what is the best way and not just go with rigid frameworks offered by a solution. What may work is a hybrid model that is on-premise, is customizable and yet priced and supported like SaaS.

Time to Implementation: Despite claims by various technology products, the time to implement and seamless integration remains a challenge. How soon a particular technology, once purchased, can be configured and rolled out to the enterprise defines the Time to Implementation (T2I). The lesser the time, the lesser will be the cost and higher benefit and competitive advantage.

Customization Support: No solution can meet the specific requirements of an enterprise without a bit of customization. The openness of a vendor to do so and the related cost makes a lot of difference. A dependable relationship rather than the brand of vendor should be the criterion.

Consulting and Implementation Services: With a decade plus of experience of implementing technology solution, real success depends on change management which becomes difficult or easier based on right selection of technology. Supporting services from the provider help in overcoming these implementation challenges. The buyers of such solution must ensure that this is taken care of at the very outset.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Software is a recurring cost. Besides the direct cost of licenses, a much larger amount goes into the related costs in terms of additional hardware/software, migration, integration and cost of ongoing service support for bug fixing, patches, customizations, content services etc. Calculating the TCO over a period of at least 3 years is a more reliable basis to estimate the total cost.

Conclusion

We can safely conclude that, in the changing environment of technology and business, it is very important to not only look at a technology solution from the perspective of its features and brand of the provider but consider the entire gamut of issues related to technology, deployment, scalability, security of the product and engagement model that a provider offers. Without these considerations, you cannot be sure if you made the right choice and if your initiative is going to succeed.

Evolution of Web: From ICE to ICE TEA!

In the first decade of web (1990-2000) an acronym was extensively used – “ICE”, it stands forInformation, Communication and Entertainment primarily to refer to the various uses of the web. Websites used to provide information that search engines used to help in finding, tools like email and instant messengers were used for communication and there were plethora of sites that used to provide entertainment content (esp. porn and jokes). It was basically a read only web driven by text and image based content powered by a dial up internet.

In the second decade (2000 – 2010) the web took a major leap in terms of the uses it can be put to and the only major difference in terms of technology capability was that it became writable and got powered by broadband internet. Ecommerce and Web 2.0 revolutionized the web and many more applications of web emerged. The web evolved from ICE to ICE TEA, in terms of the value it gives us and uses it can be put to at a basic level!

Information

We now not just read information but can also produce/publish it, netizens who were primarily consumers became prosumers (producers + consumers). The format of information evolved from just text and image to also include audio, video and animation. Today video is the fastest growing format and overall codified information doubles every 11 hours.

Communication

We evolved from just email and instant messages to phone calls, web conferencing, tweets, and status updates. Communication today has evolved and became Collaboration that can be enabled at a large level spread across continents. The challenge now is to tap into the huge cognitive surplus (as Clay Shirky puts it) that the collaborative web (Web 2.0) unleashed to us and to use it for purposes beyond just entertainment.

Entertainment

From image and text based entertainment web evolved to provide 3D virtual worlds, advance gaming and video based entertainment. It still is the biggest driver of web traffic and revenue. Challenge is to motivate netizens/prosumers to apply their cognitive surplus and web time for causes like digital activism and social good.

Transactions

Beyond ICE we started to use Web for transacting by using virtual money through credit/debit cards and net banking. Ecommerce today is a norm and still one of the fastest growing markets. We comfortably transact on web to buy products and services and do banking and other non-monetary transactions like legal and contractual.

Earning

The new participative and prosumers driven web is the place where anyone can earn from it by making their services (time, skills and produce) like coding, images/photos, tuitions etc available through various platforms, by developing applications and providing them as SaaS. This earning potential will increase with time and will become more wide spread. The percentage share offered by platforms to providers/co-creators will also increase with increased competition and reducing cost of technology.

Advertising Self

One of the most important changes that have happened with a participative web is that now people can establish online reputation by participating and collaborating online and this reputation is increasingly tracked and used to evaluate people and organizations.

So what do you think the Web will evolve to in the next decade (2010-20)? Where will it go from being ICE TEA? What can be the new uses at a generic level? Will everything move positively ahead or there could be backlashes or undoing also?

Do share your thoughts and ideas in comments.

[ img credit]

Published on pluggd.in